Arabic lessons

This is a picture of the boys with Hala. Hala is the most beautiful person and a committed and passionate teacher. She comes every week to our house to teach us classical Arabic. If you learn classical Arabic you can be understood anywhere in the middle east. Hala is from Lebanon and teaches at one of the universities here during the day, and teaches Arabic lessons at night. Tonight was our last lesson for a month or two, while Hala goes away for a summer holiday.

So far we are learning spoken conversational Arabic. We are wrestling with masculine and feminine nouns and verbs, past present and future tenses, and trying to get some vocabulary under our belts. It's a different language to learn as both the beginnings and ends of words change depending on which tense you are using, and whether you are talking to a male or female or group of people. You have to think about language and words in a different way. When Hala comes back we will start to learn to read and write in Arabic. That will be good because in English it is spelt totally phonetically and the spelling is liable to change without warning. An example of this is a district we live close to - Al Waab. It can be spelt Al Waab one minute and Al Waeb the next. I have had to loosen up with my spelling when it comes to Arabic written in our alphabet.

We have lots of favourite Arabic words. "Yemkin" means maybe. "Portokalee" is the colour orange. "Mishmash" means apricot. I could go on and on. It's great fun learning Arabic and I practice it every opportunity I can on poor unsuspecting Arabic-speakers I come across.

The boys will both learn Arabic formally next year at school.